Sony VP mentioned an E3 announcement, but said a surprise may come in the next few months

After releasing the PlayStation 3 console just over six years ago, it looks like Sony is ready to launch its successor as early as this spring.

Hiroshi Sakamoto, Sony's vice president of home entertainment, recently gave some vague details about when we'll finally see the PlayStation 4 in an interview with Chilean site Emol. According to Sakamoto, the PS4 could make an appearance as early as May of this year.

However, Sony's VP was asked whether the new console could make an earlier entrance within the next few months.

"That's still a big secret, but our friends are preparing Sony PlayStation," said Sakamoto in the interview. "I can only say that we are focused on the E3 gaming event, scheduled for June. [An] announcement may be [made] in that minute or even earlier in May."

It is rumored that the PS 4 will have a custom chip based on AMD's A8-3850 with a quad-core 2.9GHz processor and a 1GHz graphics card with 1GB memory.

The C64 example is a great example, the differences between a C64 game from 1982 and 1988 was huuuuuuge.

Rattling off raw specs doesn't make much sense with static platforms, the whole point is that developers get better and better out of optimizing specifically for them. By the end of its lifecycle it starts to overlap with the initial wave of next-gen titles.

Good call on picking up an old system as well, all three have such amazing libraries that can be had for cheap these days.